- Acting Other Items: The Observer | Letter to the Independent | Depleted Uranium | One For The Road | No Mans Homecoming | New World Order | Degree Speech Harold Pinter's work is represented by Judy Daish Associates Limited - and applications for all performances and uses of Harold Pinter's work (including amateur and professional stage performances, radio broadcasts, television transmissions and readings and use of extracts) need to be addressed to them in the first instance and in advance of finalizing your plans. Judy Daish Associates will then contact the Estate of Harold Pinter (Lady Antonia Fraser Pinter) if appropriate. The Estate should not be contacted directly for permissions. Please do not assume that a licence or permission will be forthcoming as there are sometimes conflicts between permission requests. © Harold Pinter 2000 - 2012 All Rights Reserved | Disclaimer Deleted scenes, commentary, and more. Oct. 25 2005 2:49 PM Pinter's Second Act By Mac Rogers In 1955, 50 years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter was a supporting player at the Colchester Repertory Company, acting under the name David Baron.

That same year, while rotating through a series of drawing-room dramas and Agatha Christie thrillers, Pinter began work on his first play, an eerie one-act called The Room. Five years later his masterpiece The Caretaker vaulted him to international fame, and he never needed to take another acting role for money again. Yet Pinter has continued to pursue acting through a number of small, vivid film roles, employing his giant frame and low, thunderous voice to bring life to a whole rogue's gallery of thugs, tyrants, and misanthropes. The nature of these roles is no coincidence: The characters that he plays embody the same obsessions and moral anger that inform his writing. Pinter the actor is a natural extension of Pinter the writer. Launch the video clip In Pinter's plays, conversation is a form of war. As such, conversational strategy is paramount—more important, in fact, than the content of the conversation. Characters choose their words carefully, trying to extract as much information from the person they're speaking to while giving away as little of themselves as possible.

Uncle Benny, the character Pinter plays in John Boorman's 2001 spy satire The Tailor of Panama , places a similar premium on oratorical warfare. As the ghost of Geoffrey Rush's former partner in crime, Pinter appears during high-stakes conversations to offer sage conversational gambits, whether coaxing Rush to lie when his wife demands to know where he's spending his nights, or fighting to stop him from spouting disastrous fibs when a penniless Rush attempts to sell nonexistent state secrets to the British government. In Pinter's 1961 teleplay The Collection, a man named Bill is repeatedly confronted by the angry husband of a woman he may have slept with. As Bill offers a series of contradictory explanations, it's as if he's got his own Uncle Benny whispering in his ear. In both stories, the truth becomes irrelevant in the wake of the verbal battle. Advertisement Launch the video clip Just as Pinter sees bitter conflict behind conversational banter, he also sees insecurity, heartlessness, and rage beneath the cover of proper British decorum.

Patricia Rozema's 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park would have little to distinguish itself from the recent rash of Jane Austen pictures were it not for Pinter's portrayal of Lord Bertram, the patriarch of the titular mansion. Lord Bertram is a fascinating study in light of Pinter plays like Old Times or The Homecoming, where courtly British manners often conceal layers of callousness and savagery. Lord Bertram is everything a landed British gentleman should be. He's proper, mannerly, and charming. We learn, however, that the source of his fortune—a slave plantation in the Caribbean—is awash with shameful secrets. When Bertram discovers his adopted daughter Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor) examining horrific drawings that depict the slaves on the plantation being physically and sexually abused—acts in which Bertram himself took part—Bertram tears the pictures from her hands, twisting his face into a rictus of rage and self-hatred. Underneath the genteel facade lies the heart of a tyrannical monster. He can no longer pretend that the Bertram of the Caribbean and the Bertram of Mansfield Park are different men; they are two different layers of the same man.

The condescending husband Teddy in The Homecoming, or the endlessly jealous Deeley in Old Times play out this same theme on paper, as their veneer of British politesse falls away to reveal a savage inner core. Mansfield Park offers a rare opportunity to see a great writer incarnate one of his principal themes in a single image of chilling clarity. Pinter's definitive onscreen work may be his performance in Catastrophe, David Mamet's short film of the Samuel Beckett's play—part of the ambitious 2000 British television project Beckett on Film . This seven-minute piece represents the confluence of several of Pinter's passions: He cites Beckett as his greatest influence, and the subject matter—the torture of dissidents by the state—has been his key political obsession of the last 20 years. Since his searing play One for the Road opened in 1984, Pinter has repeatedly returned to the theme of torture, both as a playwright (Party Time, Mountain Language) and an activist. In 1985, Pinter and Arthur Miller traveled to Turkey on a humanitarian mission to support Turkish writers who had been imprisoned and tortured.

And in 1988, Pinter met Beckett's inspiration for Catastrophe, the jailed Czech dissident Vaclav Havel. While Pinter's activist sympathy lies with the sufferers of torture, as a writer he explores what drives torturers, as well as the methods they employ to strip prisoners of their humanity. In One for the Road, the interrogator Nicolas questions the members of a family of political prisoners one by one in a prison in an unnamed country. Nicolas easily fends off any sense of moral outrage with the cold certainty that what he's doing is just. When a woman tells him she was raped in one of his prison cells, he asks her how many times. When she can't remember, he calmly asks, "And you consider yourself a reliable witness?" Pinter's role in Catastrophe allows him to plumb the depths of this theme further. John Gielgud plays the Protagonist—a political prisoner standing limp and pliant on the stage of a theater—while a Director (Pinter) and his Assistant prepare him for a public exhibition. Pinter orders minute changes to Gielgud's posture and clothing to make his appearance more ridiculous (and thus more humiliating).

"Raise the shins," he orders. "Higher. Bare the knees." As Pinter speaks these words, he doesn't snarl, nor does he betray any anxiety. Degrading the Protagonist is all in a day's work. The power of Pinter's performance lies in how little such degradation affects the Director. In both One for the Road and Catastrophe, the message is the same: The perpetuation of torture requires men who simply aren't bothered by the act of carrying it out. Catastrophe proves Pinter can deliver that message just as powerfully as an actor. Mac Rogers is a Brooklyn-based playwright, producer, and copywriter whose plays have been nominated for seven New York Innovative Theater Awards. - Repertory Companies Work in various repertory companies (1954 - 1959) "I saw very few plays, in fact, before I was twenty. Then I acted in too many [...] I've worked all over the place in reps - Huddersfield, Torquay, Whitby, Colchester, Birmingham, Chesterfield, Worthing, Palmers Green and Richmond.

I was an actor for about nine years (under the name of David Baron)." Harold Pinter, Twentieth Century, February 1961, pp.172-3. Roles played: Sophisticated artist in Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (Whitby Spa rep., 11 June 1954) "David Baron [Harold Pinter] was assured as the sophisticated artist, mixing charm and ruthlessness to bring the character always into focus." Whitby Gazette, 18 June 1954. A role in Here We Come Gathering by Philip King and Anthony Armstrong (Whitby Spa rep., 21 June 1954) Tops in A Horse! A Horse! By L. du Garde Peach (Eastbourne and tour) Byron Winkler in Affairs of State by Louis Verneuil (Huddersfield rep. 15 November 1954) Young lover and Amanuesis in Late Love by Rosemary Casey (Huddersfield rep. 22 November 1954) Lombard in Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie (Huddersfield rep.

29 November 1954) Harold Pinter as Tops in A Horse! A Horse! Orpheus in Point of Departure by Jean Anouilh (Colchester rep., 28 February 1955) Policeman in Waiting for Gillian by Ronald Millar and Nigel Balchin (Colchester rep., 7 March 1955) Egyptologist in Down Came a Blackbird by Peter Blackmore (Colchester rep., 3 April 1955) Candy in The Uninvited Guest by Mary Hayley Bell (Colchester rep., 18 April 1955) "David Baron [...] is this uninvited guest. He [...] keeps our interest very effectively and fully exploits the mystery and strangeness of the part; ... he conveys well the movements and attitudes of a man who has been set free after being imprisoned in the is way." Essex County Standard, 22 April 1955 A role in Lovers' Meeting by C. Bond (Colchester rep., 2 May 1955) A role in The Wooden Dish by E.

Morris (Colchester rep., 9 May 1955) US slave owner in Georgia Story by C. Cox (Colchester rep., 16 May 1955) 'Villainous' Petty Officer in Seagulls over Sorrento by Hugh Hastings (Colchester rep., 30 May 1955) A role in No Escape by Rhys Davies (Colchester rep., 6 June 1955) Harold Pinter as Candy in The Uninvited Guest Harold Pinter as Lombard in Ten Little Niggers Gentleman charmer in The Moon is Blue by F.

Hugh Herbert (Colchester rep., 13 June 1955) PE Instructor in Reluctant Heroes by Colin Morris (Colchester rep., 26 September 1955) Psychologist in The Living Room by Graham Greene (Colchester rep., 24 October 1955) Husband in You and Your Wife by Dennis Cannan (Colchester rep., 31 October 1955) A role in Serious Charge by Philip King (Colchester rep., 7 November 1955) Defending Counsel in Witness for the Prosecution by Agatha Christie (Colchester rep., 14 November 1955) Psychiatrist in The Seven Year Itch by George Axelrod (Colchester rep., 28 November 1955) A role in Present Laughter by Noel Coward (Colchester rep., 5 December 1955) TV Producer in Simon and Laura by Alan Melville (Barry O'Brien Company, The Palace Court, Bournemouth, 5 March 1956) Harold Pinter | British dramatist | Britannica.com British dramatist Samuel Taylor Coleridge Harold Pinter, (born Oct.

10, 1930, London , Eng.—died Dec. 24, 2008, London), English playwright, who achieved international renown as one of the most complex and challenging post-World War II dramatists. His plays are noted for their use of understatement, small talk, reticence—and even silence—to convey the substance of a character’s thought, which often lies several layers beneath, and contradicts, his speech. In 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The son of a Jewish tailor, Pinter grew up in London’s East End in a working-class area. He studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948 but left after two terms to join a repertory company as a professional actor. Pinter toured Ireland and England with various acting companies, appearing under the name David Baron in provincial repertory theatres until 1959. After 1956 he began to write for the stage.

The Room (first produced 1957) and The Dumb Waiter (first produced 1959), his first two plays, are one-act dramas that established the mood of comic menace that was to figure largely in his later works. His first full-length play , The Birthday Party (first produced 1958; filmed 1968), puzzled the London audiences and lasted only a week, but later it was televised and revived successfully on the stage. After Pinter’s radio play A Slight Ache (first produced 1959) was adapted for the stage (1961), his reputation was secured by his second full-length play, The Caretaker (first produced 1960; filmed 1963), which established him as more than just another practitioner of the then-popular Theatre of the Absurd . His next major play, The Homecoming (first produced 1965), helped establish him as the originator of a unique dramatic idiom .

Such plays as Landscape (first produced 1969), Silence (first produced 1969), Night (first produced 1969), and Old Times (first produced 1971) virtually did away with physical activity on the stage. Pinter’s later successes included No Man’s Land (first produced 1975), Betrayal (first produced 1978), Moonlight (first produced 1993), and Celebration (first produced 2000). From the 1970s on, Pinter did much directing of both his own and others’ works. Pinter’s plays are ambivalent in their plots, presentation of characters, and endings, but they are works of undeniable power and originality. They typically begin with a pair of characters whose stereotyped relations and role-playing are disrupted by the entrance of a stranger; the audience sees the psychic stability of the couple break down as their fears, jealousies, hatreds, sexual preoccupations, and loneliness emerge from beneath a screen of bizarre yet commonplace conversation.

In The Caretaker, for instance, a wheedling, garrulous old tramp comes to live with two neurotic brothers, one of whom underwent electroshock therapy as a mental patient. The tramp’s attempts to establish himself in the household upset the precarious balance of the brothers’ lives, and they end up evicting him. The Homecoming focuses on the return to his London home of a university professor who brings his wife to meet his brothers and father. The woman’s presence exposes a tangle of rage and confused sexuality in this all-male household, but in the end she decides to stay with the father and his two sons after having accepted their sexual overtures without protest from her overly detached husband. Britannica Stories Harold Pinter, Playwright of the Anxious Pause, Dies at 78 - The New York Times The New York Times Theater |Harold Pinter, Playwright of the Pause, Dies at 78 Search By MEL GUSSOW and BEN BRANTLEY DEC.

25, 2008 Harold Pinter , the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London. The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said Thursday. Mr. Pinter learned he had cancer of the esophagus in late 2001. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video. In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal” — Mr. Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence. Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Mr.

Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace. Continue reading the main story An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Mr. Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq, but that it had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years. Advertisement Continue reading the main story His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power. The dynamic in his work is rooted in battles for control, turf wars waged in locations that range from working-class boarding houses (in his first produced play, “The Room,” from 1957) to upscale restaurants (the setting for “Celebration,” staged in 2000).

His plays often take place in a single, increasingly claustrophobic room, where conversation is a minefield and even innocuous-seeming words can wound. Photo Julie Christie and Harold Pinter on the set of the 1971 film The Go-Between. Mr. Pinter adapted the screenplay from a novel by L. P. Hartley. Credit Everett Collection In Mr. Pinter’s work “words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other,” said Peter Hall, who has staged more of Mr. Pinter’s plays than any other director. But while Mr. Pinter’s linguistic agility turned simple, sometimes obscene, words into dark, glittering and often mordantly funny poetry, it is what comes between the words that he is most famous for. And the stage direction “pause” would haunt him throughout his career. Intended as an instructive note to actors, the Pinter pause was a space for emphasis and breathing room. But it could also be as threatening as a raised fist. Mr. Pinter said that writing the word “pause” into his first play was “a fatal error.” It is certainly the aspect of his writing that has been most parodied.

But no other playwright has consistently used pauses with such rhythmic assurance and to such fine-tuned manipulative effect. Early in his career Mr. Pinter said his work was about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” Though he later regretted the image, it holds up as a metaphor for the undertow of danger that pervades his work. As Martin Esslin wrote in his book “Pinter: The Playwright,” “Man’s existential fear, not as an abstraction, but as something real, ordinary and acceptable as an everyday occurrence — here we have the core of Pinter’s work as a dramatist.” Though often grouped with Beckett and others as a practitioner of Theater of the Absurd, Mr. Pinter considered himself a realist. In 1962 he said the context of his plays was always “concrete and particular.” He never found a need to alter that assessment. Beginning in the late 1950s, John Osborne and Mr. Pinter helped to turn British theater away from the gentility of the drawing room. With “Look Back in Anger,” Osborne opened the door for several succeeding generations of angry young men, who railed against the class system and an ineffectual government. Mr.

Pinter was to have the more lasting effect as an innovator and a stylist. And his influence on other playwrights, including David Mamet in the United States and Patrick Marber and Jez Butterworth in England, is undeniable. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The playwright Tom Stoppard said that before Mr. Pinter: “One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, ‘Tea or coffee?’ and the answer is ‘Tea,’ you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference.” With Mr. Pinter there are alternatives, “such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea,” Mr. Stoppard said, “or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea.” Photo John Gielgud, left, and Ralph Richardson performing in Harold Pinters play No Mans Land in 1975. Credit Anthony Crickmay As another British playwright, David Hare, said of Mr.

Pinter, “The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play or film he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected.” Though initially regarded as an intuitive rather than an intellectual playwright, Mr. Pinter was in fact both. His plays are dense with references to writers like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. The annual Pinter Review, in which scholars probe and parse his works for meaning and metaphor, is one of many indications of his secure berth in academia. Politics Inside the Plays While it was not immediately apparent, Mr. Pinter was always a writer with a political sensibility, which became overt in later plays like “One for the Road” (1984) and “Mountain Language” (1988). These works, having to do “not with ambiguities of power, but actual power,” he said, were written out of “very cold anger.” He and his wife hosted gatherings in their Holland Park town house for liberal political seminars. Known as the June 20th Society, the participants included Mr. Hare, Ian McEwan, Michael Holroyd, John Mortimer, Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer. In their discussions Mr.

Pinter expressed the great struggle of the mid-20th century as one between “primitive rage” and “liberal generosity,” Mr. Hare said. Through the years Mr. Pinter became known, especially to the British news media, for having a prickly personality. “There is a violence in me,” Mr. Pinter once said, “but I don’t walk around looking for trouble.” The director Richard Eyre said in a testimonial book published for Mr. Pinter’s 70th birthday that he was “sometimes pugnacious and occasionally splenetic” but “just as often droll and generous — particularly to actors, directors and (a rare quality this) other writers.” Harold Pinter was born in Hackney in the East End of London on Oct. 10, 1930. His father, Jack, was a tailor; his mother, Frances, a homemaker. Mr. Pinter’s grandparents had emigrated to England from Eastern Europe. His parents, he said, were “very solid, very respectable, Jewish, lower-middle-class people.” With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Harold, an only child, was evacuated from London to a provincial town in Cornwall.

His feelings of loneliness and isolation from that time were to surface later in his plays. When he was 13, he returned to London and was there during the Blitz when his house was struck by a bomb. He rushed inside to rescue a few valuable possessions: his cricket bat and a poem — “a paean of love” — he was writing to a girlfriend. Photo Mr. Pinter playing Sir Thomas Bertram in a scene from the film Mansfield Park, released in 1999. Credit Miramax Films Sports, poetry and his relationships with women were to remain important to him. Vigorously athletic, he was a fierce competitor in cricket and tennis. Ian Smith, an Oxford don and cricket teammate, equated Mr. Pinter’s art with his bold style of playing cricket. “Everything is focused,” he said. “It’s about performance and economy of gesture.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Poetry and Pacifism Mr. Pinter grew up on a diet of American gangster movies and British war films. From the first he was a great reader and a hopeful poet, with strong political judgments. When he was called up for military service at 18, as a pacifist he refused to serve.

In diverse ways he remained a conscientious objector in the years to come, echoing a line in “The Birthday Party,” in which Stanley, a lodger in a seaside boarding house, is suddenly taken away by two strangers to some ominous future as a friend cries out, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” Years later, Mr. Pinter said he had lived that line all his life. Mr. Pinter’s first poem was published in a magazine called Poetry London when he was 20. Soon afterward he completed a novel, “The Dwarfs.” After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, he signed on with a repertory company and, performing under the name David Baron, toured Ireland in plays by Shakespeare and others, often in villainous roles like Iago. In 1955, at a party in London, Mr. Pinter was struck by what he referred to as “an odd image.” A little man, who later turned out to be the writer and professional eccentric Quentin Crisp, was making bacon and eggs for a large man who was sitting at a table reading the comics. Mr.

Pinter told his friend Henry Woolf about the incident and said he thought he might write a play about it. The next year Mr. Woolf, then a graduate student at the University of Bristol, asked him if he could write that play for a group of drama students. The resulting work, “The Room,” was Mr. Pinter’s first play. And with its story of mysterious intruders and its elliptical speech, it showed that Mr. Pinter had already found his voice as a dramatist. It opened in Bristol on May 15, 1957, and was restaged three years later at the Hampstead Theater Club in London. In 1956 Mr. Pinter married Vivien Merchant, an actress in the company. After their son, Daniel, was born in 1958, they moved to the Chiswick section of London. He wrote “The Birthday Party,” his first full-length play, drawing on his memories of touring as an actor in Eastbourne, on Britain’s south coast. Photo Harold Pinter with his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, at Buckingham Palace in 1999.

Credit Peter Jordan/Associated Press The Pinters, who were temporarily unemployed and desperately poor, had an offer to act in Birmingham, and Ms. Merchant wanted to accept it. But Mr. Pinter said: “I have this play opening in London. I think I must stay. Something’s going to happen.” She replied, “What makes you think so?” Advertisement Continue reading the main story They turned down the acting offer. “The Birthday Party” opened in the West End in 1958 and received disastrous reviews. Then, prodded by the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, Harold Hobson, the eminent critic of The Sunday Times of London, came to see it at a matinee. What he wrote turned out to be a life-changing review. “It breathes in the air,” Hobson wrote. “It cannot be seen, but it enters the room every time the door is opened.” He continued: “Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you, and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too.

There is terror everywhere.” He concluded, “Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.” Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Despite that review the play closed that weekend. By contrast Mr. Pinter’s next full-length play to be produced, “The Caretaker,” which opened in London in 1960, was a dazzling critical success. “Suddenly everything went topsy-turvy,” Mr. Pinter said. In that play two brothers live in a seedy house in London and, for inexplicable reasons, invite a homeless man named Davies to share their quarters and to act as a kind of custodian. Michael Billington, a critic for The Guardian and Mr. Pinter’s biographer, has called the play “an austere masterpiece: a universally recognizable play about political maneuvering, fraternal love, spiritual isolation, language as a negotiating weapon or a form of cover-up.” Mr.

Pinter’s next play, “The Homecoming,” opened in London in June 1965, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Mr. Hall. The story of an all-male family headed by a Lear-like father and the woman (Ms. Merchant, who starred in many of his plays) who enters and disrupts their domain scored a major success in London. Though it received a mixed reception in New York, “The Homecoming” won a Tony Award as best play and had a long run on Broadway. A Shift of Focus After these first three full-length plays — all stories of raffish characters in shabby environments — Mr. Pinter shifted his focus. His next three dramas were set in the worlds of art and publishing: “Old Times” (1971), “No Man’s Land” (1975) and “Betrayal” (1978), all studies of the unreliability of memory and the uncertainty of love. In “Old Times” a husband and wife encounter a woman they may or may not have known in the past. Photo Harold Pinter in his writing studio in London in 2007.

Credit Steve Forrest/Insight-Visual for The New York Times In “No Man’s Land” a faded poet visits a wealthy patron for an evening of recollection and gamesmanship, roles played in the original production by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, who repeated their performances in New York the next year. The elegant “Betrayal” is a play about marriage and duplicity and, despite its use of reverse chronology, is among Mr. Pinter’s most accessible works. It was made into a 1982 film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge. During the run of “No Man’s Land” Mr. Pinter began an affair with Lady Antonia Fraser, the biographer and historian, who was then married to Hugh Fraser, a conservative politician. In 1980 Mr. Pinter and Lady Antonia were married, with Mr. Pinter becoming the substitute paterfamilias of an extended family. In addition to his wife, his survivors include his son, Daniel, and his stepchildren, Benjamin, Damian, Orlando, Rebecca, Flora and Natasha. Years ago his son changed his last name to Brand, his maternal grandmother’s maiden name.

He had been estranged from his father, living as a recluse in Cambridgeshire. Advertisement Continue reading the main story After “Betrayal” Mr. Pinter’s plays became shorter (like “A Kind of Alaska”) and then, for about three years, they stopped. “Something gnaws away,” he explained, “the desire to write something and the inability to do so.” He added, “I think I was getting more and more imbedded in international issues.” At the same time he continued his involvement in films, highlighted by his close collaboration as screenwriter with the director Joseph Losey, which began in 1963 with “The Servant,” a depiction of class relations in Britain. That was followed in 1967 by “Accident,” about a professor infatuated with a student (Mr. Pinter and Ms. Merchant each had minor parts), and “The Go-Between” (1971), about a boy’s complicity in an adult affair in turn of the century Britain, with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.

His many screenplays for other directors include “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964), about a woman (Anne Bancroft) drifting through multiple marriages, directed by Jack Clayton; “The Last Tycoon,” Elia Kazan’s 1976 adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel; and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981), a Karel Reisz film with Meryl Streep and Mr. Irons. With his plays “Moonlight” (a portrait of family relationships undermined by years of divisiveness) and “Ashes to Ashes” (a story of “torturers and victims” reflected in a typically uncommunicative marriage), Mr. Pinter returned to the longer, somberly meditative form. Photo Harold Pinter also appeared onstage as an actor, here performing Samuel Beckett's one-man play "Krapp's Last Tape" at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2006. Throughout his life, he specialized in playing menacing characters, including several in his own plays.

Credit John Haynes/Lebrecht His final work, “Celebration” (2000), is a wry look at power-conscious couples dining in a chic restaurant that bears a striking resemblance to the Ivy, a famous theater gathering place in London. “Celebration” was inspired by the playwright’s early days as an unemployed actor, when he took a job as a busboy at the National Liberal Club. Because he dared to intrude on a conversation among several diners, he was fired. The Writer as Director He often directed plays by others, especially those by Simon Gray (“Butley,” “Otherwise Engaged”), and occasionally his own work. Increasingly and with greater zeal he appeared as an actor — onstage with Paul Eddington in “No Man’s Land” and in films like “Mojo,” “Mansfield Park” and “The Tailor of Panama.” Throughout his life he specialized in playing menacing characters, including several in his own plays (“The Hothouse,” “One for the Road”).

In July 2001 the highlight of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York was the presentation of nine Pinter plays, including a revival of “The Homecoming,” and a pairing of his first and last plays, “The Room” and “Celebration.” Mr. Pinter participated as a director and also acted in “One for the Road” in the role of a dapper and sadistic government interrogator. The Pinter festival was the capstone of a season that, in London, featured the premiere at the National Theater of a stage version of his film script for “Remembrance of Things Past.” Late in 2001 he directed an acclaimed revival of “No Man’s Land,” starring John Wood and Corin Redgrave at the National Theater. Advertisement Continue reading the main story In December 2001, during a routine medical examination, he was found to have cancer of the esophagus. In January 2002, while undergoing treatment, he acted in his brief comic sketch “Press Conference” at the National Theater in a malicious role as a minister of culture who was formerly the head of the secret police.

In 2006 he appeared in a weeklong, sold-out production of Beckett’s one-man play, “Krapp’s Last Tape,” at the Royal Court Theater. “Pinter looks anxiously over his left shoulder into the darkness as if he felt death’s presence in the room,” Mr. Billington of The Guardian wrote. “It is impossible to dissociate Pinter’s own recent encounters with mortality from that of the character.” Revivals of Mr. Pinter’s work have become increasingly frequent in recent years. Last December an acclaimed production of his “Homecoming” opened on Broadway. Mr. Pinter said he thought of theater as essentially exploratory. “Even old Sophocles didn’t know what was going to happen next,” he said. “He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings.

We’re not talking about the moon.” Speaking about his intuitive sense of writing, he said, “I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out.” “I don’t go away and say: ‘I have illuminated myself. You see before you a changed person,’ ” he added. “It’s a more surreptitious sense of discovery that happens to the writer himself.” Few writers have been so consistent over so many years in the tone and execution of their work. Just before rehearsals began for the West End production of “The Birthday Party” half a century ago, Mr. Pinter sent a letter to his director, Peter Wood. In it he said, “The play dictated itself, but I confess that I wrote it — with intent, maliciously, purposefully, in command of its growth.” He added: “The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.” Mel Gussow, a critic and cultural reporter for The Times, died in 2005.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Harold Pinter, Whose Silences Redefined Drama, Dies at 78. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

Question: Which famous playwright acted under the name David Baron?
Answer: Harold Pinter